Bridges from Bamako | life in a budding West African metropolis

This is a story about some encounters I had nearly 20 years ago in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, while researching my dissertation on transnational migrants from the western Sahel. It was in Brazzaville that I got to know a Malian named Malik, who...

“The French military, suffused with colonial ideology and stuck in obsolete schemas of the ‘War on Terror,’ is incapable of correctly analyzing the situation. Caught between French decision-makers unwilling to lose face and African leaders shirking their...

For the past few years, Mali’s industrial gold production (as reported by the Malian government in various press outlets) has been trending upward:
This is surely good news: add rising production levels to the climbing value of gold on world markets and you have a growing benefit to the Malian economy and the Malian treasury. Mali has become Africa’s third-largest gold producer and is ranked sixteenth...

Today marks 33 years since Mali embarked on its transition from single-party authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. Many of us observing events in the country have presumed that throughout its two decades of multiparty, democratic rule beginning...